[act-ma] (Wed.) 4/30 Sebastian Smee and Paul Tucker Unpack the Ways to Look at Art at Cambridge Forum

[Cambridge Forum]

Cambridge Forum
3 Church Street,  Cambridge, MA 02138
617-495-2727
email:  director at cambridgeforum.org
cambridgeforum.org

Release                                                                     
                                                                        April 16, 2014

Sebastian Smee and Paul Tucker discuss “Learning to Look” at Cambridge Forum


On Wednesday, April 30,at7 pm Cambridge Forum hosts Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee and internationally known art historian Paul Tucker exploring the web of meaning contained in a work of art in “Learning to Look”.  In its materials, its style, its imagery and iconography, art tells us about itself, its maker, and the society in which it was created. 
How do the critic and the historian open up a work of art to reveal its meanings?  How does art become significant for the ordinary viewer? Where can that appreciation lead? 

Sebastian Smee is the art critic for the Boston Globe. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for what the Pulitzer
Committee called his "vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation".
Prior to joining the Globe, he was national art critic for The Australian and has also worked for The Daily Telegraph,
written a regular column for Prospect magazine and contributed to a number of other publications in the United Kingdom. 
Smee has written a book on the relationship between Matisse and Picasso and the text to go with five books on Lucian Freud.   He is currently completing a new book. 

Paul Tucker has the kind of title that is almost unique in the world of academe.  He is the Paul Hayes Tucker Distinguished Professor of Art, a chair that was established in his honor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston where has taught art
history since 1978. Regarded as one of the foremost authorities on Claude Monet and Impressionism, Tucker has curated more than a half dozen international exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Japan.  The author of 11 books, he recently completed the catalogue of the 19th- and 20th-century paintings in the Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and is now writing a college level textbook on modern art called Never Neutral. Modern Art: Courbet to Pollock.  A
hallmark of his approach to the study of art is a multilayered integration of art, history, and biography. Tucker served as President and Chairman of the Board of the Terra Foundation for the Arts, and is founder and Director and moving force in the continuing expansion of Arts on the Point, a public sculpture park in Boston. 

The program is free and open to the public.  It takes place at First Parish in Cambridge, 3 Church Street in Harvard
Square, at 7 pm. “Learning to Look” is part of ArtWeek Boston's spring series; free tickets can be reserved at www.cambridgeforum.org.

This program is part of the series My Life Touched by Art, supported by a grant from the Cambridge Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a public agency.

Cambridge Forum is recorded and edited for public radio broadcast.  Select forums can also be viewed in their entirety on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/WGBHForum.  There will be a book signing after the program.

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Cambridge Forum
3 Church Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone:  617-495-2727
email:  mailto:director at cambridgeforum.org
website:  http://www.cambridgeforum.org

The Adventure of Ideas.  The Power of Dialogue.